A Note on Iconicity and Motivation of Expression

While iconic effects can be detected at all levels of linguistic analysis, according to the standard position they have little, if any, relevance for the system of language. I would like to show that iconicity seems marginal only in static approaches. Motivation of form is central whenever a new way of expressing things is looked for. Once we see that language is about finding new means of expression, the obvious question to ask is what makes these means suitable: why they are accepted as satisfactory ‘vehicles’ of meaning. From this point of view, the issue of iconicity — correspondence of form and meaning — turns out to be an instance of a more general phenomenon: adequacy of symbols for novel tasks. The interactive theory of metaphor will be presented to substantiate the claim that conventional forms and meanings can be viewed as a reservoir of motives for expressive purposes

Emergency surgery on mentally impaired patients: standard in consenting

Emergency surgery is often performed on the elderly and susceptible patients with significant comorbidities; as a consequence, the risk of death or severe complications are high. Consent for surgery is a fundamental part of medical practice, in line with legal obligations and ethical principles. Obtaining consent for emergency services (for surgical patients with chronic or acute mental incapacity, due to surgical pathology) is particularly challenging, and meeting the standards requires an up-to-date understanding of legislation, professional body guidelines, and ethical or cultural aspects. The guidance related to consent requires physicians and other medical staff to work with patients according to the process of ‘supported decision-making’. Despite principles and guidelines that have been exhaustively established, the system is sometimes vulnerable in actual clinical practice. The combination of an ‘emergency’ setting and a patient without mental ‘capacity’ is a challenge between patient-centered and ‘paternalistic’ approaches, involving legislation and guidelines on ‘best interests’ of the patient

False Memory Syndrome: The Creation of a Vision of Nation’s Recent History by Communist Authorities in Poland (in search of a research model)

The paper deals with the collective historical memory of Polish society and is divided into two parts. In the first one the utility of psychological categories and concepts originally developed around the recovered memory therapy and the false memory syndrome for studying attempts to change collective memory made "from above ” is discussed. The second one seeks to apply some of them to the study of a radical transformation of Poles ’ historical memory undertaken by the new communist ruling elite after WWII. The paper is focused on the crucial aspect of this issue, i. e. school education in history and history textbooks for elementary and junior high schools that were published in the early 1950s form its empirical basis

W. T. W. Pisarz-idol. Witold Wirpsza w lekturze Stanisława Barańczaka

The outline discusses Stanisław Barańczak’s fascination with Witold Wirpsza’s works. Its clearest symptom was his infection with Wirpsza’s ‘stylistic tissue’, which is something Barańczak himself admitted. This infection is clearly visible in the first three collections: Facial Corrections (Korekta twarzy), Without Stopping for Breath (Jednym tchem) and Morning Journal (Dziennik poranny). The key sources of references and inspirations for these collections were Wirpsza’s poems from the collection Superstitions (Przesądy) and the digressional poem Faeton. The article demonstrates how Stanisław Barańczak presents the readers with a specific ‘key to Wirpsza’ in his works of literary criticism. According to the author of The Diffident and the Proud (Nieufni i zadufani), literary criticism was unable to cope with Wirpsza. What pushed the young poet from Poznan to remodel the reading of Wirpsza’s poetry and to make significant changes to contemporary poetic tendencies was the collection Superstitions (Przesądy) published byWirpsza in 1966, one year after his essay collection Game of Meaning (Gra znaczeń). Barańczak assigned Wirpsza to the language poetry movement. In his later accounts of reading, Barańczak the critic suggested that there was a ‘deep gap’ between Wirpsza’s achievements from various periods of his work. He claimed that Wirpsza was first a political poet, and he wanted to perceive the later stages of the life of the ‘poet-idol’, generally, as undergoing ‘rapid and dramatic changes’: one of the socialist realist poets, experimenter, a difficult poet, original theoretician accused of creating ‘art for art’s sake’ and ‘excessive hermeticism’ and finally an ‘emigrant’ who turned out to be a political writer, only to become, finally and unexpectedly, a religious poet

Sulfenamides as flame retardants

FIELD OF THE INVENTION The present invention is in the field of flame retardants and relates to use of sulfenamides as flame retardants, in particular in polymeric sub-strates

The Hymnic Code in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz

Hymnic genre awareness in Czesław Miłosz`s poetry is included into metadiscursive statements. Poetic sel-commentary often leads to encapsulating the entire work in the hymnic genre. The hymn becomes an identification of the author`s poetics and develops into a literary type. The author of the sketch questions for the proper understanding of the hymn in reference to all found in Miłosz`s poetry direct indications of genre correlations as well as for the modes in which other ways the hymnic tradition are summoned. Is there a nonthematized hymn in this poetry and, if so, in what way can it exist? From his debut until "Last poems" (Wiersze ostatnie) Miłosz is observed to carry out a lon-lastin process of codification of the qualities of hymnic expression which is being accomplished in a constant dialogue with the forms already attested. Reffering to the analysis of metatextual statements found in Miłosz`s poetic texts, the article concludes that the use of the term in question goes beyond its narrow literary genetics meaning. The Polish poet seems to be drawing on the ancient synonymy of the term of "hymnos" and poetic creativity at large. The objective of the analysis is the mode such awareness is reflected in hymnographic production. The presence of hymnic code is seen as one of the elements which unites Miłosz`s literary output. Miłosz`s notion of hymn crosses the limits of his poetics. Hymnicity, then, stems from experiencing the sacred but is primarily viewed as an existential project. Miłosz`s "living in hymn" reminds of Hoilderlin`s hymnicity.NPRHBalbus 2000: Balbus, Stanisław. Zagłada gatunków. In: Bolecki and Opacki, Genologia dzisiaj. Warsaw: IBL PAN.Błoński 1998: Błoński, Jan. Jan Błoński. 1998. Miłosz jak świat. Kraków: Znak.Danielewicz 1986: Danielewicz, Józef. Hymn w systemie gatunków liryki greckiej. Pamiętnik Literacki 1977 (1).Gadamer 2001: Gadamer, Hans Georg. 2001. Poetica. Translated [into Polish from German] by Małgorzata Łukasiewicz. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN.Hutnikiewicz 1973: Hutnikiewicz, Artur. Hymny Jana Kasprowicza. Warsaw: Państwowe Zakłady Wydawnictw Szkolnych.Lipski 1975: Lipski, Jan Józef. Jan Józef Lipski. Twórczość Jana Kasprowicza w latach 1891-1906. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.Sarbiewski 1954: Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz. O poezji doskonałej, czyli Wergiliusz i Homer. (De perfecta poesi, sive Vergilius et Homerus). Translated [into Polish from the Latin] by M. Pleź, edited by S. Skimin. Wrocław: Ossolineum,Semczuk 1992: Semczuk, Małgorzata. Hymn. In Alina Brodzka, Mirosława Puchalska and Małgorzata Semczuk, eds. Słownik literatury polskiej XX wieku. Wrocław: Ossolinem.Schnayder 1960: Schnayder, Jerzy. Hymn. Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich 1960 (1)

Estimating the Hausdorff measure by recurrence

We show a new method of estimating the Hausdorff measure (of the proper dimension) of a fractal set from below. The method requires computing the subsequent closest return times of a point to itself

History and the Unconscious

This work represents the first truly comprehensive and non-biased history of psychohistory, a vanguard branch of historical scholarship that studies the psychological dimension of the past using principles of psychoanalysis and psychology as its theoretical ground. Tomasz Pawelec is an experienced methodologist and historiographer who systematically examines, reconstructs, and evaluates the major theoretical and methodological guiding assumptions shared by psychohistorians. In effect, he provides the reader with an intriguing portrait of a peculiar research paradigm – and a specific intellectual “monad” – that developed within the twentieth-century American history. At the empirical foundation of his work lies a broad collection of psychohistorical publications